A message to Americans: you may not be interested in transgenderism, but transgenderism is interested in you — especially if you have school-age children or grandchildren.
You may not fully realize it, but, when it comes to this subject, you inhabit an entirely different society than you did twenty years ago. Published in the year 1994, the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) included several pages on gender identity disorder, a malady whose sufferers think they’re “a woman trapped in a man’s body” — or vice versa — and that is comparable to anorexia (skinny people thinking they’re fat) or body integrity identity disorder (people wanting their limbs amputated). The fifth edition (DSM-5), issued nineteen years later, eschews the word “disorder,” referring instead to “gender dysphoria,” which it defines as “clinically significant distress or impairment related to gender incongruence.”
